Join us on Twitter and IRC (#ludumdare on Afternet.org) for the Theme Announcement!

Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

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So the results are in! So awesome to see the final scores and see what games got in overall, and see where everyone else’s results are on the rankings. Since this is my third successful Ludum Dare, I thought I’d try a little comparing to see how much I did better (or worse) at this point. Then for future Ludum Dare entries I can then add in those results and probably build a chart to see my progress.

The Results

My Comments

So while the ranking don’t appear to have changed, the average score for most categories has improved. The only category to have gone down considerably over the three LDs was Humor, although in fairness since my game wasn’t intended to have humour so I could’ve omitted the category. I’m also one of the people that got 100% coolness which is an awesome surprise, it means I’m (technically) listed on the results page. At the moment I’m balancing University work and turning Glow Drop into an Android and Windows Phone release as Glow Drop DX. So hopefully you might see more from me in the future?

Now that LD30 is over I want to share my LD29 game release on Google Play. This is my android version of my game Skin for the theme “Beneath The Surface”. It has a new title Derick the Littlest Demon and has more levels, better art, new mechanics and enemies.

You play as a small demon that must remove humans from his cave. After you kill them you can possess their bodies and hide in them or turn them into zombies.

Well, after some tuning and graphics updates, I decided to submit Tiny Haunt, my LD29 entry, to IndieCade. While the LD feedback was vastly positive, there was one common complaint: the game wasn’t hard enough. I intended the game to be fairly sandboxy, and to that end, fairly easy if you choose. However, I ran out of time to implement the mechanics that made it more than that. In the IndieCade build each of the four levels has its own optional challenge, which might be defeating enemies within a certain amount of time, or using only one ability. I’m happy with the progress I’ve made so far, but there is still so much to do! A big part of the future experience will be enhanced interactions with enemies and more objects put at your disposal. On top of that I have plans to add an exploration element that allows you to uncover the long lost secrets of your castle. Exciting times ahead!

Here’s a preview of the IndieCade build. If you’re interested in the game, don’t hesitate to follow me on Twitter (@rojomojogogo), or add Tiny Haunt to your watch list on IndieDB.

72 in mood! Oh, my GOD! Thanks a lot people, I love you all! Even though my goal for each LD is to get better than last LD had failed this time if one judges by overall (last LD I scored 6 more than this one) I still think I succeeded, I never’ve been in top 100 in any category, so this is big deal for me! This LD was a lot of fun and now I am waiting for August even more! (You see, I have a birthday on 26th of August!)

Now, let’s look at graph, they’re so popular these days!

As you can see, I gradually getting better in most categories. The Big problems I can see is Fun and Theme (Though I guess, I can call it fixed because of this LD). I don’t really care about humor, as I never intended to make a humorous game.

Well, thanks for reading this unformated, random text. And I’ll see you all next Ludum Dare!
– RedPanda

I made a video as well, it shows my absolute first impressions. Check this out! I’m kind of pleased anyway, and even though I expected a little bit more, it was still far my most successfull Ludum Dare event!

Not Your Average Mining Emulator*

This would be my fifth finished game, but also the seventh Ludum Dare I’ve tried to join in on. And I’ve got to say that this was not one of the themes I was hoping for myself, but I still did what I usually do; Sit down for a few hours just after the theme’s released (3am here in Sweden) and sketch up a few game ideas. And then I can take those ideas and polish them after sleeping on it for a few hours.

The ideas I managed to sketch down for this LD were of a Diablo UI inspired rougelike, a submarine hunting game that also spun off as a wreck hunting game idea, an idea for a submarine shoot’em’up, and finally something of a clone of the old game Motherlode and Clonk. In the end I decided to go for the final idea, as that was the one I felt held the most promise with the lowest amount of graphical work (my weakest point).

So, with that in mind.

What went right?

Had already prepared a simple framework that worked well for a 2D sidescrolling digging game, helped cut down some on the development time. Inputs and things prepared in advance is really nice, since otherwise such things would eat development time.

Streamed everything, every second I was at the computer. This really helps with the focus, and I even managed to keep enough attention on the chat to be able to answer some questions that arose from viewers.

My art ability seems to have improved slightly since I started Ludum Dare, so the first sprites I did for trees and ores came out looking really well.

My thoughts on UI design turned out perfectly fine too, I’ve noticed that many people’ve commented on how nice and smooth the in-house UI looks.

A crafting system turned out easier than expected, so I was able to throw it together and put in two recipes in only about one and a half hour.

What went less right?

Didn’t think to grab an existing physics engine like Box2D, so lost a huge amount of time writing physics and debugging them. There’s actually a collision bug that slipped through when I was working on ladder support, since I moved some code about and accidentally removed the part of code preventing you from jumping when you have a wall above your head. I really need to cure my NIH syndrome I guess, but it’s just so much fun to recreate the wheel.

Didn’t feel I had enough time to really work towards sound or music in the game, so it’s a very silent game. This is something I really suck at doing, so I guess I won’t be releasing any games that take in high scores on Audio any time soon.

Still can’t draw a player character in any way, so the player stayed as a cube saying ‘IDLE’ until the last couple of hours. And even then I only really managed a simple stick man.

I failed to put together an inventory system like what I originally thought of making, so lost several hours of development rewriting that. In the end I figured that only having a single object on the player was acceptable, and spent more time getting the house to be able to store things.

Because the inventory system failed to be finished I had lots of code that was supposed to be used with in-game tools that you couldn’t craft or carry.

Didn’t have ingredients for proper food laying about, so ended up with simpler food and that just doesn’t feel as good. No food photos from me this time.

Other thoughts.

Another entry made from scratch in C++ using SFML, this is starting to look like a theme for my entries I think. Maybe I should sit down far in advance of the next one and create a larger base framework so I could use that instead, based on SDL maybe?

This Ludum Dare I decided to try a simpler game without using my home-grown entity component system Kunlaboro, so this game is more of a statemachine based game. And while it feels really good to go back to my roots for a simple game, I can’t help but feel that I could’ve gotten so much more done if I’d used Kunlaboro for it…

I should try to move game logic away from base C++ code and towards scripts, maybe using Lua or Angelscript. This needs for me to have more time before the start of the compo so I can properly prepare the framework though.

To finish, thank you to all the people watching me work. And those of you that commented on the entry, both during the stream and during judging, every bit of criticism helps.

I’ll be seeing about maybe cleaning this up later on and releasing a post-compo version, though I don’t know how much of the original code would be left afterwards. It started off so nice and neat, but now the codebase if just a horrible bunch of duct tape fixes.

[My name is Carlos Leituga, I’m a Game Designer, and once again I joined the Make A Game team to create a game in 72 hours for Ludum Dare #29.]

We were a smaller team this time: two programmers, one artist and myself in the same room, while another artist was about 1 thousand Kilometers in a straight line from us, and we could only talk to our musician through email. We couldn’t afford to be too ambitious so… no pressure.

It’s been a while since I did any game design from the ground up. With the exception of two months doing freelance work at the start of this year, I’ve been unemployed for more than a year now and I felt a bit rusty. My focus lately has been shifting from completing older design docs, to learning Game Maker Studio, and then deciding that I should read up more on logical thinking for programming, and at the same time spruce up my memory on an easy to learn language that I was still familiar with, Processing.

This led into choosing Game Maker Studio as our framework, besides the other three local team members having some experience with it, during any design downtime I could jump into the sprite or level editor and help them out. Hell, I could even help search for solutions if we’d get stumped by some of the different ways GMS does things, I can say I’m way too experienced in that.

Here is a short post-mortem of my third Ludum Dare Entry (Jam): Below Earth.

In it you play an adventurer (bomb throwing maniac) that is exploring an underground cave only to find a rather hostile environment.

This time I also tried out some new tools like IntelliJ (IDE) and Aseprite (Pixelart) and I have to say I like them.

The somewhat good things:

Brainstormed the idea long enough and then sticked with it.

Prototyped graphics really quickly.

The game is actually fun to play.

I successfully drew my own pixelart with aseprite.

I didn’t neglect my personal duties during the weekend.

Don’t mess with the local wild life.

The rather bad things:

I originally intended to procedurally generate levels, but then I realized, that I have absolutely no experience with procedural level generation. I ended up with uninteresting and lazy “random” levels. So I later created a level parser to read text-files and made some quick levels, but I also left some of the generated levels in it.

It’s too hard. I slowly start to see a pattern with my Ludum Dare games. I always balance it in a way, so that I still have a challenge, but that might not be an acceptable difficulty for others. Having difficult levels itself isn’t the problem, but having a too steep difficulty curve is a problem. I should learn to slowly(!) ramp up the difficulty of the game. Giving the game to playtesters often and early can really help with this.

Hiding content in later levels. Because of it’s difficulty, some players never got to see every enemy that the game has to offer. This might be something not true for game-design in general, but it holds true for Ludum Dare, where most people probably don’t have the time to try and master your game. This means all the main game features should be available within the “easy” levels, and only combine them and challenge the player after those levels.

This is another entry without music. Music is important for a game, but before I hastily make some annoying 10 second loop I rather leave the game without music. This might be a personal goal for my next LD to focus on music and create some for my game. I just have to find a program I can make some with and learn to use it….

I created pixelart. It’s not good, but it’s better than anything I’ve created yet. Still it took far longer than it should have.

No Web version. I really tried to get that GWT build to work, but there are so many things that go wrong when they somehow possibly can…

Time spent (aka everybody loves statistics)

During the whole weekend (Saturday to Monday because it’s a Jam Entry) I recorded my development time with toggl.com, which is really useful for such things. I ended up spending more time on graphics than I thought I would. Programming seems to be so big, because I was always testing my game inbetween bigger changes and played it over and over again. I also spent a whole hour setting up the project because I was using Libgdx without eclipse. 😉

That’s how I spent my weekend.

Conclusion

Every Ludum Dare helps me in some way to become a better developer and even a better person. 😀

I found some new nice tools with which I will continue to work.

I also should try to make my future games not too difficult for the average player.

I already started and will continue to develop a post-compo version of this game, because this is one of my first games where I feel like polishing it is worthwile.

This is my 3rd LD and this time I wanted to write a postmortem to share my thoughts and experience. Deep Descent is the compo game and you can play it here. It’s a game where you have to get to the center of the planet by killing monsters and using your totally physically accurate harpoon gun that bounces off enemies and gains their power.

The Good

Good concept: To make use of the theme we came up with the side view. A sectioned planet made the theme evident both visually and from a go
al standpoint: you can see your progress clearly and it’s not a very common concept to use a spherical world (I miss you, Populous 3!). To add gameplay to this idea we wanted an original weapon. Not just X diverse weapons, but one unique weapon that can function as X weapons. That way we came up with the harpoon gun. It makes use of gravity on a spherical world so it’s pretty unique to control, and it bounces off enemies acquiring their power, which makes for some cool combos.

Diverse team: It was the first time I worked in a jam with so many people (4 programmers, 1 2D artist and 2 musicians). Most of the jams I’ve done
up until now were by myself or 2-3 people that were always programmers. It was a great experience to work with and coordinate so many diverse figures in the not-most-ideal conditions (but more on that later)

Experienced team: Each of us had previous experience working on other games or jams, experience wi
th the tools we used and some of us had even worked together

Good music and graphics: At the end of what seemed like the 1000th hour of programming I had barely listened to the music our guys had composed and hadn’t really paid much attention to the graphics, but I was amazed at the end to see how nicely everything fell into place together and raised the enjoyment of what I could only describe as “a buggy mess”. Erika‘s cute character design and drawings (made so the game could be enjoyable to her little brother) and Igor‘s and Roland‘s compositions gave life to everything!

The Bad

Remote communication: We couldn’t find a place to fit so many people for 3 days so we made due with Google Hangouts. I all of the jams I’ve done I’ve always worked with my teammates face to face. Online communication is slower, and it gives you less incentive to work, because you’re not as committed as when you SEE your mates working constantly. It was obvious that organizing 7 people online would be a huge challenge, but considering this was our first time I think we managed to do it pretty well.

Overextending design: “4 programmers can implement X amount of features” I thought. What I didn’t really consider was what would happen when 2 of them didn’t work full time on the project. They had told me this from the start but I was hoping to convince them to invest more. The design of the game needed 4 enemy types (and consequently 4 weapon types) and a boss to be fun. A layered design would have been better in this case (and in general really). Features that are most fun should be implemented first and the others left last. For a jam, I have come to believe that a single mechanic should be designed at the beginning. When that’s working it can be:

Lots of bugs: In the end we actually had 4 enemies, but their intelligence, attacks and powers given to you harpoon gun were all very bugged and unreliable. The teleporter to the next level works 1/10th of the time, and the player was even invulnerable when it was first published. While some of these bugs were patched and will continue to be patched soon, it was a terrible state for the game to be in for the voting stage.

Lack of polish: If you’ve read this up until now this was obviously coming. There are things can be done to improve the experience, like the fact that you don’t have much to do on each layer except jump and kill enemies. The game mechanics are not clear and have to be explained before: you can’t tell what powers your harpoon has, you can’t tell what the objective is or how the teleporters work

Hope this was an interesting read and see you guys in 3 months when I’ll be using all the stuff I’ve learned.

Well, it was a nice first Ludum dare, and my first published game in quite a long time; I’m the type of person who begins many projects, but “takes a lot of time to finish them”… So the two-day deadline was very positive for me. I had first thought of using pixel graphics, but the theme (and the fact that I’m not that good at pixel graphics) made me think of a more vectorial and music oriented game.

It was my first LD and, in fact, my first game. Actually I’ve been playing with Unity quite a long time, and wanted to make some simple game, but somehow I always tend to end up with some abstract and complex idea which is not-so-easy to implement, and do nothing.

So my main goal was to actually finish my entry. And that’s the main thing that went right I made it! The main thing that went wrong though is that I wasted too much time.

Idea and general

Underground worms was literally the first thought that came to my mind (and just to mention: I never played death/megaworm). So I started to make a worm immediately. And all that “worm” part of idea went OK I think.

But when it came to the “player” part I just got stuck. I had some ideas including bombs, some distracting items, using of environment(e.g. some safe stone islands) but didn’t manage to have a clear enough picture of how it should work.

So just to start I made throwing rocks mechanic. I actually made aiming with mouse first =/ and then changed it to keyboard aiming. The main reason was that I wanted character to throw only ahead, so you have to face a worm before throwing, but for some reason it felt awkward to me with mouse. Anyway aiming doesn’t make much sense since you don’t have enough time to aim and in general shouldn’t even try.

Really sad thing is that such simple idea as to make more weapons came to me too late. I decided to make some melee and shotgun but only managed to add some halberd-like weapon which actually made it more easy and fun. But it seems that a lot of people just didn’t see it so if you’re one of them please just skip to the 4th level and try it! (you can skip level after dying!)

(some response to comments)
Many told me that “it should give some indication where the worm is going to break the surface”, but it doesn’t make much sense given the way the worm moves. The worm tries to reach you so it’ll break the surface exactly where you stand UNLESS you’re moving, then it would surface at some distance from you and more horizontally. And of course you cannot see the worm beneath the surface, because YOU CANNOT SEE WHAT’S BENEATH THE SURFACE, that’s the very idea.

“Soundtrack” was made relatively fast, I was playing with synths recently and had most of them already set-up, and music itself… well, it’s so simple and straightforward if you ask me. It sounds EPIC though In the middle of the work I thought that it would be great to make a feel of total wormapocalypse, to match the music fully, e.g. add some burning and falling buildings and some people to save but I would definitely need at least an artist to do this.

Alas, I didn’t have any time to make proper sounds.

Graphics

There is not much graphics, but graphics took much time. Character took I beileve 2-3 hours overall. I made him twice actually, and have been tweaking come colors and animations every now and then. Worm took over an hour. At least I’m happy with graphics.

Time management

Time management in general is what I’m bad at.
Fist day was productive I think. I made most of the graphics and most worm-related things. But somehow I totally wasted second day. I got stuck with gameplay. After making some gameplay I’ve been spending too much time playing game instead of making it So I ended up with the game being far away from finished at the end of day 2 and decided to use 3rd day. Nonetheless there was a lot to do, and all “levels”, sounds and other finalizations were made in last few hours of Jam. I managed to made it just in time of deadline, and it was 5 a.m. for me… such crazy!

Main things learnt

KEEP WORKING! If you’re stuck, switch to other things you’ll have to make, or just try to implement it as simple as you can, but keep working.

Anyway I’m glad that I made it! And I had fun playing your games, can’t wait for another LD!

WHAT WENT RIGHT

1. It’s pretty! I wanted a very beautiful game and I think that went well. There’s a ton of art in this thing. As usual, I create new assets as needed. I ended up with two large photoshop files: an overworld sea where you navigate the ocean in your pirate ship, and a battle screen, where I made all battle sprites and animations. What this lets me do is keep a consistent color palette and style across the whole project, and essentially replaces the concept art stage that a normal game goes through. I used amazing references like Legend of Zelda Windwaker and Breath of Fire IV.

Overworld assets

2. I learnt tons of stuff! I used cinema4D and my nonexistent 3D skills to make a fast and loose 8-direction ship with minimal effort. I tried my hand at procedural generation: all islands are generated randomly within certain limitations, to keep the level solvable and the sea traversable. I had a stroke of genius at the last moment and created a “miner” entity that swims through the level and places gold coins wherever it goes, at runtime. This was to ensure an interesting curving path through the level, so players would want to explore it.

3. It’s a complete adventure, my storytelling skills were also, I thought, nonexistent, but the story of Sunny and Cod just flowed through me like I was on fire. It’s got a beginning, middle and end, it’s got obstacles and emotions. I usually end up making a very unfulfilling game. This time I feel I made a difference.

4. it has a branching storyline. Well, ok, a few tiny branches. Such as when you are defeated by the 3 blacktopuses you get a different message to the one you get if you clear them. Or when Sunny tells you you need the fast sail if you don’t have it, but acknowledges if you’ve already bought it. But that’s still a lot of work. I have a much better grasp of how to implement a dialogue system.

5. it has a turn-based battle system: implemented from scratch. Boring and barebones, yes. But it gets the job done.

6. I get to develop it further. I’m dedicating the next 6 months to this game. I started a new devlog here

WHAT WENT WRONG

1. No sound I didn’t have the time

2. Button-mashing battles the battle system is uninteresting. That’s ok, and it’s all I had time for, but if I’m going to make this a full-fledged RPG, I need a good battle system. Feel free to send me ideas. Grandia and Child of Light are obviously lovely choices, where the result of a battle can be spectacularly overturned. Also Persona 3 and Fallout 2 have good battle systems. Since you’re spending half the game in battle, I owe it to myself to fix the button-mashing boringness.

3. Time management. Well I don’t know, I did a lot for three days. But it’s not as fun as a more complete experience such as the amazing SCUBA BEAR (go check it out NOW). On the other hand, I like to follow through with my ideas for Ludum Dare, instead of making a smaller game just because of time constraints.
Here’s my Timelapse video:

And thanks to everyone who commented, everyone who played my game, everyone who made a game for us to play. I love Ludum Dare, I want to never stop making games.